What works were at issue in Golan? As Breyer described, “foreign works published abroad after 1923, of which there are many millions, including films, works of art, innumerable photographs, and, of course, books – books that (in the absence of the statute) would assume their rightful places in computer-accessible databases, spreading knowledge throughout the world.” Moreover, many of these were obscure orphan works (works with no locatable rightsholder) that are now effectively off limits to educators, film collectors, community orchestras, and database compilers who previously had the right to use them for free.

What are the limits on this decision? Could Congress recall the works of Shakespeare, Plato, Mozart and Melville from the public domain, and create new legalized monopolies over them? It is hard to imagine anything more contrary to the First Amendment – would privatizing Shakespeare by government decree abridge freedom of speech? – or to the attitudes of those who penned the Copyright Clause that limits Congress’s power to create new exclusive rights. Yet if one reads Golan, one searches in vain for any limiting principle on Congress’s actions. In this decision, Justice Ginsburg’s majority opinion effectively denies the public domain any meaningful Constitutional protection. Under the U.S. Constitution, says this case, the public domain is “public” only by sufferance. It may be privatized at any moment, at the whim of the Congress and without violating the Bill of Rights.

it seems like a good opportunity to recall the underlying complexities of calculating copyright term duration: If you have a fast internet connection and a big screen, you may want to take a look at this 25 MB pdf, which depicts the decision trees for 30 european jurisdictions that power the public domain calculators on www.outofcopyright.eu.

Sadly, this looks less likely to come to fruition thanks to opposition from collecting societies, who seem to think they have a right to payments even from libraries trying to do their job by helping the public gain access to information. Argentina's archaic copyright system may be very different, but its collecting societies are clearly no different from those in other countries.

With a wide-open, long tail platform, the Amazon bans junk ebooks is going to be very tough to enforce, but they’re right. Having someone selling 10,000 books each computer generated and each based on Wikipedia content wasn’t good for anyone.

Googlebooks has scanned tons of PUBLIC DOMAIN BOOKS, but not all PUBLIC DOMAIN BOOKS are accessible. There are a tons of PUBLIC DOMAIN BOOKS that Goglebooks refuses to UNLOCK for full view. It is terribly important to know that scanning is not preservation and does not mean access. Besides, will Google care enough to make multiple scanned copies available? Will we be able to see the errors and additions in certain volumes or not once the originals disappear?

I realized a diagram including all the most important opendata licenses that are now available, and classifying them according to their legal effects (attribution and share-alike, attribution only, public domain). I hope this work can be useful to better understand the actual situation of database (open)licensing.

Multinational companies – the same ones who cry poverty and demand far-reaching laws like the Stop Online Piracy Act – have laid title to public domain videos, "homesteading the public domain", and they are abusing Google's copyright peace offering to steal from the public. author » Cory Doctorow